


Five Times Everyone Was Wrong About Scotty (And One Time Someone Was Right)

by Black_Crystal_Dragon



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon-Typical Violence, Engineering, M/M, No Smut, Rumours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-03
Updated: 2011-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-11 20:09:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7905955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Crystal_Dragon/pseuds/Black_Crystal_Dragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the Enterprise, there are rumours about every department and every member of staff – but the most interesting definitely revolve around Montgomery Scott and the Engineering Department. Most of them are wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Everyone Was Wrong About Scotty (And One Time Someone Was Right)

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the many clichés of _Star Trek_ fanfiction about Scotty and Engineering. They were mostly found on or inspired by the Star Trek XI Kink Meme. This is done with love, though; I actually adore the funny, sexy, silly, wonderful fics and prompts that inspired the headings!
> 
> Thanks should go to Memory Alpha, because that’s where I got 90% of my background information.
> 
> Beta’d by the ever-lovely ice_elf. Imported to AO3 in August 2016.

**I – There’s A Still In Engineering**

Scotty was just about to go back to his quarters at the end of a long and gruelling day. They had been up against a Klingon ship. Though the ship and her crew had escaped more-or-les intact, with no hull breaches and no deaths – thank goodness – there were too many men and women in sickbay and too much damage to the _Enterprise_ for anyone to be at ease. Someone pressed the chime on Scotty’s office door and, for a moment, Scotty dropped his head onto the desk and groaned. It would be another shiny-faced incompetent asking him to come and fix something else that would take several hours and strip him of his downtime.

He raised his head, put on a professional expression as he steeled himself, and hollered, “Come in!”

The door opened and Scotty lifted his eyebrows. Not a recruit fresh from the academy, then. It was Dr McCoy, sporting dark shadows under his eyes and a haggard expression. He rose to his feet, his stomach twisting. There had been a fair few injuries in Engineering and seeing the ship’s doctor down in the bowels of the ship, in person, immediately made Scotty wonder if there had been a death. “Doctor?”

“Scotty,” McCoy said, giving him a nod. He walked forward a little way, not looking him in the eyes.

Scotty cleared his throat, growing more uneasy. “So, was there anything you came down here for specifically?”

McCoy looked up as if surprised, then flashed a tiny smile. “No. Well, there’s a biobed that needs looking at, but it’s not urgent – it’ll wait ‘til you’ve had some sleep. You look as if you need it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not the only one,” Scotty replied, relaxing a fraction now that he felt fairly certain no one was dead. “You look as if you could do with a good night’s rest, too.”

McCoy coughed and looked embarrassed. “About that …”

Scotty frowned, losing the thread a little. The other man rubbed at the back of his neck, not looking at him again. “Look, I wouldn’t normally ask, but I’m out of whiskey, and I’m going to need a nightcap after today …”

Scotty stared at him in surprise. “What?”

“Oh, c’mon, Scotty – I’ll pay the going rate, whatever that is.”

Scotty’s eyebrows rose further still. “Excuse me?”

Finally, McCoy raised his head and made eye-contact from under a deep frown. “What? I’m not going to hand you over to Kirk for brewing moonshine, Scotty, if that’s what you’re worried about!”

“Moonshine?” Scotty spluttered, not quite able to believe what he was hearing. “McCoy, I – I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s not – I don’t have a _still_ down here!”

McCoy stared at him fixedly, mouth slightly open. He looked as confused as Scotty felt. Finally, he closed his mouth and shifted from foot to foot. “But everybody says –”

“I don’t care what everybody says, there’s enough highly flammable substances in Engineering without adding alcohol to the mix!” Scotty snapped, becoming more offended the more he thought about it. It was ridiculous. “Who told you that?”

McCoy shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s common knowledge.”

“Not to me!”

“OK, OK!” McCoy said in an equally sharp tone. “Fine, you don’t have any, you never did.”

He turned and stormed out of Scotty’s office. Scotty sat back down at his desk, shaking his head in disbelief.

***

**II – Scotty’s Into Mechaphilia**

Scotty enjoyed his work; that was a well-known fact. Anyone who had tried to have lunch with the man on a work day – which, on the _Enterprise_ , was every day – would realise it from the way that he never actually shut up about the ship. Common topics of conversation included the upgrades he’d made in the past few days or weeks; his future plans for her; and the myriad things that had gone wrong which were _always_ Kirk’s fault because he was _always_ getting them into unnecessarily close shaves that put the _Enterprise_ in danger. He would freely admit that he loved the ship. He had never known another like her. She seemed to respond so well to every improvement, every change he made to her.

What he didn’t realise was just how the rest of the crew read into it.

He was sitting in his quarters one evening, quietly reading an Engineering journal, when his door chimed. He went over to open it and found – to his surprise – Spock on the other side. The Vulcan inclined his head a fraction. “Mr Scott.”

“Spock,” Scotty replied, feeling slightly at a loss. He stepped back from the door and made a vague gesture with one hand. “Come in …?”

“Thank you,” Spock said as he stepped over the threshold. The door closed smoothly behind him and the Vulcan clasped his hands behind his back, face as impassive as always.

“What can I do for you?” Scotty asked, internally debating whether to offer Spock a seat, or perhaps a drink. (Tea, not whisky, for obvious reasons.)

“The Captain has asked me to arrange some activities on board the ship for Alternative Sexuality Week. He had assured me that it is a new part of Starfleet protocol, but I am unconvinced,” Spock told him. Was that a note of irritation creeping into his voice, Scotty wondered, or was he imagining things? He folded his arms and waited for the Vulcan to continue. After a moment’s pause, Spock went on, “Nevertheless, I have my orders. He suggested that I approach you with regards to a talk of some description.”

“A talk?” Scotty repeated. Spock inclined his head, and Scotty started to wonder what exactly was so alternative about his sexuality that the Captain and First Officer wanted him to talk about it. He had to ask. “What kind of talk?”

“The Captain informed me that the term is ‘mechaphilia’,” Spock replied as evenly as always. For a moment, Scotty could do nothing but blink at him. Then he felt a blush creeping up his neck, equal parts embarrassment and temper. Spock noticed immediately – as he always did with human emotions – and told him, “If the subject embarrasses you, you are under no obligation to agree.”

“Spock,” Scotty said, with more calm than he really felt. “Let me make something clear: I am not a mechaphile.”

Spock looked at him with his head tipped just slightly to one side as if he were some kind of specimen in a jar. “I apologise if you were attempting to keep your feelings for the _Enterprise_ a secret.”

“My feelings for the _Enterprise_?!” Scotty said incredulously. “I don’t – oh, this is stupid, I’m not in love with the ship!”

“There is no need for your denial; the crew, including myself, are accepting of your sexual proclivities, Lieutenant Commander.”

Scotty stared for a moment, open-mouthed, then reached across and pressed the button to open the door. “I’m not giving a talk on mechaphilia, because I am not a mechaphile and I am not in love with the ship. Good night, Spock.”

Spock inclined his head graciously, accepting Scotty’s really quite rude dismissal, and left without saying anything more than, “Good night.”

Once the door had closed again, Scotty punched the wall and swore vehemently. A man couldn’t even take joy in his work any more without people getting the wrong end of the stick.

***

**III – Engineering Builds Sex Toys**

There were rumours about every department, and every member of staff; Scotty knew that. It didn’t make it any better that he and his department seemed to attract the worst of them. He knew they bore the brunt of the _Enterprise_ ’s gossip mill, because after the incident with McCoy and the moonshine, he hadn’t wanted to be in the dark about any more Engineering-related hearsay. He told himself it was because so much of what they did in Engineering was mysterious, hidden away on decks no one casually visited. The thought didn’t exactly help whenever he discovered a new rumour.

“Sex toys,” Scotty said, deadpan. He was pretty damned certain that getting upset about it wouldn’t help matters. He supposed he ought to be thankful, really. At least Kirk had the common decency to look sheepish about the whole thing.

“Yeah, well, it’s been a while since the last shore leave, and I make a point to not have casual sex with my crew, and – well. There’s only so much of this – “ Kirk made an instantly recognisable hand gesture, “– you can do, you know?”

Scotty closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. There were many things he would do for the man, but he drew the line at this. “Why me?” he murmured to himself before he dropped his hand and tried to look his Captain in the eye. “Captain. Sympathetic as I may be, I can’t build you sex toys. I never have for anyone, and I have no idea where you got the idea that I did.”

Kirk frowned. “You’re not going to get into trouble for misuse of Engineering’s resources, Scotty …”

“I’m sure you’d be very lenient, Captain, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t make them,” Scotty told him firmly. “For anyone.”

Kirk started to blush faintly. Scotty turned back to the repair he had been working on before Kirk had interrupted, and tried to look busy. Beside him, the Captain cleared his throat. “Well, uh – thanks, Scotty. I’d better get back to the Bridge …”

“Yes, I think you’d better, sir,” Scotty said calmly. He really wasn’t sure how to feel about this whole mortifying incident. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to look Kirk in the eye again. The gesture he had made earlier seemed to have superimposed itself on the inside of his eyeballs; he kept seeing it every time he blinked.

He finished the routine repair with ease and started back along the corridor, muttering to himself. “Manufacturing sex toys, indeed …”

***

**IV – Scotty Couldn’t Command To Save His Life (Or Anyone Else’s)**

“This is why we don’t send the Captain and First Officer down onto hostile planets together,” Dr McCoy grumbled from the back of the Bridge. Uhura was picking up a live feed from the away team’s communications, and it didn’t sound good. One by one, each link was being terminated, and there was no way of determining how; their people were under heavy fire and in no position to send a status report back to the ship.

“Do not send backup,” Kirk shouted suddenly. “Do not send backup, _Enterprise_ – get out while you still can!”

Then his communicator died, and they were left in silence.

Sulu spun in his chair. “What the hell do we do now?”

“The Captain and First Officer are out of commission,” Uhura said, managing a valiant attempt at Vulcan emotional control. “Command of the Bridge passes to the next highest ranking officer.”

“Which is?” McCoy asked in a tense growl.

“Scotty.”

 

By the time he arrived on the Bridge, Scotty had had the situation explained to him – in great detail – several times. As if he wasn’t already aware of it; as if Engineering was some dim backwater, not capable of receiving the same transmissions as the bridge.

He walked across to the Captain’s chair and laid his hand on the backrest, but didn’t sit down. It felt odd, to be standing beside this chair with the right to sit in it, and he knew that everyone else felt the same.

“Right,” he said.

Before he could get any further, a multitude of voices piped up out of the silence, offering up advice. He looked around at the anxious faces of the men and women on the Bridge. He didn’t know them by name, as he knew his engineers, but he could recognise fear in anybody’s eyes. He held up a hand and waited for silence to fall.

“Thank you, for your input,” he said calmly. “But I know what needs to be done. First of all, Uhura – have you tracked the away team’s location?”

“Aye, sir,” she replied, bringing up a map on the main screen. “It appears to be a prison, well-guarded from what we can tell, both by guards and by technology.”

Scotty walked around to the front of the chair and sat down, not caring any more that this was Kirk’s seat. Kirk wasn’t here. Scotty was. The crew needed to realise that. “Could you bring up the data we have on the technology guarding our people?”

Uhura nodded and did so. Scotty scanned it briefly, then looked across at Chekov. “If we could get a transporter array set up down there, we could beam them out.”

The navigator looked over his shoulder and smiled. “I could set that up.”

“Good. Go, pick up a Security team – two Security teams to go down with you,” he ordered. Chekov bounded off to do as he was told and Scotty turned his attention to Kirk’s last transmission. “The Captain told us to leave, which suggests to me that we might be in trouble, so shields up and be ready for an attack.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary?” Sulu began, but as he spoke the ship was hit by an impulse charge that knocked McCoy off his feet.

“Shields up, Mr Sulu,” Scotty ordered. “And evasive action, if you please!”

***

**V – Scotty Loves The _Enterprise_ Above All Else**

The _Enterprise_ limped back into space, out of range of the aliens’ planet-based weapons and short-range ships. It had its full complement of crew back on board, some injured but all alive. Although Kirk was back, Scotty was still in charge and there was still much to be done before the mission could be classed as over. The enemy fire had taken its toll on the shields and hull, not to mention their own weapons systems, and it would take several days of repair work for the Engineering department to get everything operational once more.

Scotty could tell that the crew expected him to be heading back to Engineering. He could see it in the confused faces he passed, decks away from his normal area of operations, bent on a more important mission. Truth be told, it was where he ought to be headed: his expertise would be needed in the lower decks, he was sure. For now, however, he could let his people do their jobs unsupervised. There wasn’t a man or woman among them he didn’t trust with the ship’s wellbeing, though he had heard many rumours to the contrary. By this point, he was pretty sure he knew what was being said and about who better than some of the most fanatic gossips aboard, simply so that he wouldn’t be surprised again by unusual requests and bizarre offers.

He stepped into Sickbay a few minutes later and was met by a hassled nurse – Chapel, he thought her name was. She seemed relieved that his arrival didn’t herald more patients, and as he looked around it wasn’t difficult to see why. Most of the biobeds were taken up by members of the two away teams, but there had been shipboard casualties, too. Scotty spotted Kirk lying in one corner and shook his head in the man’s direction, silently cursing the Captain’s lack of caution. Then he went over to McCoy.

The doctor was beside Chekov’s bed, tending to the young man’s injuries. Though the two security teams Scotty had sent planetside with him had done their best to draw the aliens’ fire away while Chekov set up the transporter array, some had broken through. Their weapons had left an ugly burn across Chekov’s right shoulder.

McCoy looked up as Scotty approached, looking irritable, but relaxed a fraction when he realised it wasn’t Nurse Chapel with news of another medical emergency. “Oh,” he said flatly. “It’s you.”

Given the circumstances, and the way McCoy usually treated Kirk when this many ended up in Sickbay, Scotty took it as a compliment that that was all he had to say. He nodded at Chekov. “Be all right, will he?”

Chekov’s eyes, tightly shut against the pain, shot open and he looked at Scotty as if surprised to see him there.

“Give him a couple of hours and he’ll be good as new,” McCoy growled. He pressed a final few buttons on the dermal regenerator he had rigged above the young man’s shoulder, then stalked off to attend another patient, grumbling about how it wouldn’t be necessary if Kirk wasn’t so damned – Scotty didn’t hear the rest. He stepped into the space the doctor had left and smiled down at Chekov.

“We got everybody?” Chekov asked before he could say anything. Scotty remembered suddenly that he had passed out shortly after completing the transporter array: a blow to the head from one of the aliens. He swallowed hard: he had heard the dull thump of impact over the communicators, the shouts of the security team as they fired on the enemy. Chekov had been the first to be transported back, directly into Sickbay. He didn’t know yet how the mission had ended, and he was surrounded by injured bodies. It was no wonder that he looked a little panicked.

“We got everybody,” he said with a reassuring smile. “Thanks to you. You did an excellent job.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Chekov said, beaming up at him as if the words had melted away that vestiges of pain that McCoy’s hypospray hadn’t yet dispersed. Scotty reached out and brushed the curls off his forehead.

“Listen, I’d better do the rounds,” he said with a sigh, gesturing at the other occupied biobeds. It wasn’t hard to miss Chekov’s surprised frown, especially when he was expecting it. Like everyone else, he expected Scotty to rush back to Engineering to patch up his precious _Enterprise_ , expected him to put metal and plastic before people. Scotty swallowed the hurt that rose up his throat and forced himself to smile. “Shouldn’t take long. Then I’ll be back to sit with you, OK?”

He didn’t give Chekov time to answer, or even to react. He couldn’t take another expression of shock. Instead, he turned and hurried towards the next biobed to check in with its occupant. It took him less than half an hour to go around to each bed, beginning with the people he had sent down before moving on to Kirk and Spock’s team. The surprise slowly melted, as he made his way around, into pleasure as he congratulated each of them on a job well done and wished everyone a speedy recovery. He left talking to Kirk and Spock, however, until the morning. They had probably endured a lecture from McCoy already, and wouldn’t be needing another. 

Finally, when he had been to the last bed, he made his way back to Chekov. The young man was asleep, helped along the way by a cocktail of pain medication and sedatives. He could feel McCoy watching, eyebrows raised high on his forehead, as he stole a chair and placed it carefully beside Chekov’s biobed before settling into it. He ignored the doctor’s curious gaze and leant his head back against the wall. He had a promise to keep.

***

**VI – One Time Someone Was Right**

The first thing Scotty was aware of was someone saying his name – softly, almost apologetically, as if they were reluctant to be waking him up. The second was the godawful pain in his neck. What had possessed him to sleep with his head tilted back at such an awkward angle?

Then he remembered, and the voice calling his name fell into place: it was Chekov. He had been sitting with Chekov in Sickbay. He forced his protesting neck muscles into action, tipping his head forward with a groan. Then he opened his eyes. Chekov was crouching on the floor in front of him, hands resting on his knees and a concerned expression on his face. Well, Scotty thought, it was preferable to _surprise_. He’d seen just about enough _surprise_ in the past twenty-four hours.

“You should not have slept like that,” the younger man pointed out.

“No, you’re probably right,” Scotty said, raising a hand to pressing his fingers into his neck muscles, willing the ache to disappear. “Has McCoy given you a clean bill of health?”

“Da,” Chekov said with a smile. “My shoulder is good as new, not even a scar.”

He said that last with a hint of regret that made Scotty chuckle as he levered himself out of the chair. Chekov bounced to his feet with far more energy than Scotty felt anyone had a right to at – he glanced at the Sickbay chronometer – this hour of the morning. It was only half-way through Gamma Shift, and yet, as he glanced around the room, many of the biobeds were now empty. The Captain and First Officer were conspicuously absent.

“Go one, get out of my Sickbay – both of you,” McCoy said in an irritable undertone, and Scotty belatedly noticed him standing on the other side of the bed. “I have enough sick people in here without the healthy taking up space in here.”

Scotty rolled his eyes – making absolutely sure that only Chekov could see, he wasn’t awake enough to face McCoy’s wrath – and headed for the door. They walked together towards the nearest turbolift, and Scotty noticed that Chekov’s silence was less comfortable than usual. He pressed the lift’s call button and turned to look at the younger man.

“What?” he said, taking the blunt approach. It was so early that it was practically still the middle of the night; this was no time for skirting around the issue.

Chekov looked up at him, his face uncharacteristically grave. “Thank you,” he said. “For staying with me.”

Scotty shrugged. “I was where I needed to be.”

Spock would probably have picked him up on the flaw in his logic there, pointing out that he was probably needed more in Engineering – but his absence couldn’t have been felt too much, since no one had called him with an emergency that could be handled by none other than Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott. Chekov, however, did not. On the contrary, his face broke into a huge smile.

“I knew you would stay,” he said.


End file.
